How to Worry Friends and Inconvenience People

Tell people that in her heyday Margaret Thatcher's nickname was "The Iron Maiden"

Tell people that Stan Laurel’s last words were “Kiss me, Hardy”

Tell people that Oscar Wilde’s last words were “I told you I was gay”

If you are fourteen, and into the supernatural, spell your age like this: “Fortean”

Describe people who are pointlessly proud of things as “whyumphant”

Measure the difficulty of games and puzzles in units of the cubic rube

Refer to zoos as “captivity parks”

Hassle the Hoff

Call your home your “shell”

End an exam essay with “The End”, or “Fin” if it is a French exam

Refer to white people’s dreadlocks as “wedlocks”

Refer to your flatmates as “flo-mos” and your housemates as “ho-mos”

If you call a TV a “gogglebox”, call your computer the “googlebox”

Insert extra syllables into words, as if you are an old person: “escialator” “Holland & Barnett”

Describe daydreaming as “going to commercial”

Practise Shipmanship, the art of resembling Harold Shipman

Refer to music that sounds a bit like The Prodigy as “prodigious”

…or “prodigal”

Describe people as “unconventionally ugly”

Call a ladder that isn’t yours, but belongs to a close relation, your “step ladder”

Refer to wages lost due to flu as the “congestion charge”

Refer to all public clocks as “Big Bens”

Refer to MySpace as “Rupert Murdoch’s teenage mass observation project”

Refer to getting up in the morning as “greeting the day”, e.g. “What time do you have to greet the day?”, or “I take my showers when I greet the day”